In Q3, Facebook Drove 4x More Traffic Than Pinterest

With a $200 billion market cap and an active user base that rivals the entire population of China, Facebook has significant staying power.

For publishers, marketers and site owners, this is especially important because Facebook is the leading driver of social referrals to sites across the web. Also, surprisingly, over the last year, Pinterest has been giving Zuckerberg and company a run for their money as the #2 source of social referrals.

In the 3rd Quarter 2014 edition of the Shareaholic Social Media Traffic Report, we take a look at how much traffic each of the 8 most popular social networks sent publishers’ way. The data reveals “share of visits,” a percentage of overall traffic — direct traffic, social referrals, organic search, paid search, etc. — sites received, for Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google Plus, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

This June, Facebook delivered nearly a quarter of the total visits sites around the web received. While its share of traffic has marginally shrunk since then, the ubiquitous social network still drives 4x more traffic than Pinterest.

Section I: Social Referrals Over Q3 2014

Our first chart observes “share of visits” for each social network over the months of June, July, August, and September 2014. The final column quantifies how much each social platform’s share has changed from June (end of Q2) through September (end of Q3).

Of the eight social networks tracked, only two — LinkedIn and Google Plus — drove a greater share of traffic at the end of Q3 than they did at the end of Q2. The other six each saw their share of traffic decrease slightly, between 1.03 – 0.01 percentage points.